selection drawn from:
Acting Out Culture. 2nd ed. Ed. James S. Miller. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 470-80
ILLIAM DERESIE
ICZ
Faux Friendship
The explosive growth and burgeoning popularity of online social networking
sites raise important questions about the ways we are redefining friendship.
It is beyond dispute that these new technologies have reconfigured the
ways we think about, talk to, and define our friends. Less clear, however,
is whether these changes are for the better. Taking up this question,
William Deresiewicz offers a pointed critique lamenting the demise of more
traditional models of friendship while asking us to consider whether making
communication easier and more accessible has opened up new possibilities
for connection and understanding as well. Deresiewicz was associate
professor of English at Yale University and is a well-respected literary critic
whose work has appeared in the Nation, the American Scholar, and the
Chronicle of Higher Education, where the following essay was published in
March of 201 0.
"[A] numberless multitude of people, of whom no one was close, no one was
distant. ..." -War and Peace
"Families are gone, and friends are going the same way." - In Treatment
E LIVE AT A TIME WHEN FRIENDSHIP HAS BECOME BOTH ALL AND
nothing at all. Already the characteristically modern relationship,
it has in recent decades become the universal one: the form of connection in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are
all measured, into which they have all dissolved. Romantic partners refer
to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Spouses boast that they are
each other's best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg their
teenage ones to think of them as friends. Adult siblings, released from
competition for parental resources that in traditional society made them
anything but friends (think of Jacob and Esau), now treat one another in
exactly those terms. Teachers, clergymen, and even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard
them as friends. We're all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for
president, we ask ourselves whom we'd rather have a beer with. As the
anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now.
Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming?
The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social
space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are
470
DERESIEWICZ
I FAUX FRIENDSHIP
our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction? When
they've shrunk to the size of a wall post, do they retain any content? If
we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any? Facebook isn't the
whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future.
Yet Facebook-and MySpace, and 'TWitter, and whatever we're stampeding for next-are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They've
accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn't initiate it.
They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn't invent
it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become
friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone.
We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship-friends,
after all, are the only people we have left-but it's not clear that we still
even know what it means.
How did we come to this pass? The idea of friendship in ancient
times could not have been more different. Achilles and Patroclus, David
and Jonathan, Virgil's Nisus and Euryalus: Far from being ordinary and
universal, friendship, for the ancients, was rare, precious, and hardwon. In a world ordered by relations of kin and kingdom, its elective
affinities were exceptional, even subversive, cutting across established
lines of allegiance. David loved Jonathan despite the enmity of Saul;
Achilles' bond with Patroclus outweighed his loyalty to the Greek cause.
Friendship was a high calling, demanding extraordinary qualities of
character-rooted in virtue, for Aristotle and Cicero, and dedicated to
the pursuit of goodness and truth. And because it was seen as superior
to marriage and at least equal in value to sexual love, its expression
often reached an erotic intensity. Jonathan's love, David sang, "was
more wondrous to me than the love of women." Achilles and Patroclus
were not lovers-the men shared a tent, but they shared their beds
with concubines-they were something greater. Achilles refused to live
without his friend, just as Nisus died to avenge Euryalus, and Damon
offered himself in place of Pythias.
The rise of Christianity put the classical ideal in eclipse. Christian
thought discouraged intense personal bonds, for the heart should be
turned to God. Within monastic communities, particular attachments
were seen as threats to group cohesion. In medieval society, friendship
entailed specific expectations and obligations, often formalized in
oaths. Lords and vassals employed the language of friendship. "Standing
surety"-guaranteeing a loan, as in The Merchant of Venice-was a chief
institution of early modern friendship. Godparenthood functioned in
Roman Catholi~ society (and, in many places, still functions) as a form
of alliance between families, a relationship not between godparent and
godchild, but godparent and parent. In medieval England, godparents
were "godsibs"; in Latin America, they are "compadres," co-fathers, a
word we have taken as synonymous with friendship itself.
471
6
I HOW WE CHANGE
The classical notion of friendship was revived, along with other
ancient modes of feeling, by the Renaissance. Truth and virtue, again,
above all: "Those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act
of friendship," wrote Montaigne, "for to undertake to wound and offend
a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him." His bond with
Etienne, he avowed, stood higher not only than marriage and erotic
attachment, but also than filial, fraternal, and homosexual love. "So
many coincidences are needed to build up such a friendship, that it is a
lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries." The highly structured and,
as it were, economic nature of medieval friendship explains why true
friendship was held to be so rare in classical and neoclassical thought:
precisely because relations in traditional societies were dominated by
interest. Thus the "true friend" stood against the self-interested "flatterer" or "false friend," as Shakespeare sets Horatio-"more an antique
Roman than a Dane"-against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Sancho
Panza begins as Don Quixote's dependent and ends as his friend; by the
close of their journey, he has come to understand that friendship itself
has become the reward he was always seeking.
Classical friendship, now called romantic
friendship,
persisted through the 18th and
Are our friendships
19th centuries, giving us the great friendships
now anything more
of Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley,
than form
Emerson and Thoreau. Wordsworth addressed
his magnum opus to his "dear Friend" Coleridge.
distraction?
Tennyson lamented Hallam-"My friend ...
My Arthur ... Dear as the mother to the son"-in the poem that became
his masterpiece. Speaking of his first encounter with Hawthorne, Melville
was unashamed to write that "a man of deep and noble nature has seized
me." But meanwhile, the growth of commercial society was shifting the
very grounds of personal life toward the conditions essential for the
emergence of modern friendship. Capitalism, said Hume and Smith, by
making economic relations impersonal, allowed for private relationships
based on nothing other than affection and affinity. We don't know the
people who make the things we buy and don't need to know the people
who sell them. The ones we do know-neighbors, fellow parishioners,
people we knew in high school or college, parents of our children's
friends-have no bearing on our economic life. One teaches at a school
in the suburbs, another works for a business across town, a third lives on
the opposite side of the country. We are nothing to one another but what
we choose to become, and we can unbecome it whenever we want.
Add to this the growth of democracy, an ideology of universal equality and inter-involvement. We are citizens now, not subjects, bound
together directly rather than through allegiance to a monarch. But what
is to bind us emotionally, make us something more than an aggregate of
a
472
of
DERESIEWICZ I FAUX FRIENDSHIP
political monads? One answer was nationalism, but another grew out of
the 18th-century notion of social sympathy: friendship, or at least, friendliness, as the affective substructure of modern society. It is no accident
that "fraternity" made a third with liberty and equality as the watchwords of the French Revolution. Wordsworth in Britain and Whitman in
America made visions of universal friendship central to their democratic
vistas. For Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism, friendship was
to be the key term of a renegotiated sexual contract, a new domestic
democracy.
Now we can see why friendship has become the characteristically
modern relationship. Modernity believes in equality, and friendships,
unlike traditional relationships, are egalitarian. Modernity believes in
individualism. Friendships serve no public purpose and exist independent of all other bonds. Modernity believes in choice. Friendships,
unlike blood ties, are elective; indeed, the rise of friendship coincided
with the shift away from arranged marriage. Modernity believes in selfexpression. Friends, because we choose them, give us back an image of
ourselves. Modernity believes in freedom. Even modern marriage entails
contractual obligations, but friendship involves no fixed commitments.
The modern temper runs toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility,
the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal,
improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever
we want, however we want, for as long as we want.
Social changes play into the question as well. As industrialization
uprooted people from extended families and traditional communities
and packed them into urban centers, friendship emerged to salve the
anonymity and rootlessness of modern life. The process is virtually
instinctive now: You graduate from college, move to New York or L.A., and
assemble the gang that takes you through your 20s. Only it's not just your
20s anymore. The transformations of family life over the last few decades
have made friendship more important still. Between the rise of divorce
and the growth of single parenthood, adults in contemporary households
often no longer have spouses, let alone a traditional extended family,
to turn to for support. Children, let loose by the weakening of parental
authority and supervision, spin out of orbit at ever-earlier ages. Both look
to friends to replace the older structures. Friends may be "the family we
choose," as the modern proverb has it, but for many of us there is no
choice but to make our friends our family, since our other families-the
ones we come from or the ones we try to start-have fallen apart. When
all the marriages are over, friends are the people we come back to. And
even those who grow up in a stable family and end up creating another
one pass more and more time between the two. We have yet to find a
satisfactory name for that period of life, now typically a decade but often
473
6 I HOW WE CHANGE
a great deal longer, between the end of adolescence and the making of
definitive life choices. But the one thing we know is that friendship is
absolutely central to it.
Inevitably, the classical ideal has faded. The image of the one true
friend, a soul mate rare to find but dearly beloved, has completely
disappeared from our culture. We have our better or lesser friends,
even our best friends, but no one in a very long time has talked about
friendship the way Montaigne and Tennyson did. That glib neologism
"bff," which plays at a lifelong avowal, bespeaks an ironic awareness
of the mobility of our connections: Best friends forever may not be on
speaking terms by this time next month. We save our fiercest energies for
sex. Indeed, between the rise of Freudianism and the contemporaneous
emergence of homosexuality to social visibility, we've taught ourselves
to shun expressions of intense affection between friends-male friends
in particular, though even Oprah was forced to defend her relationship
with her closest friend-and have rewritten historical friendships,
like Achilles' with Patroclus, as sexual. For all the talk of "bromance"
lately (or "man dates"), the term is yet another device to manage the
sexual anxiety kicked up by straight-male friendships-whether in
the friends themselves or in the people around them- and the typical
bromance plot instructs the callow bonds of youth to give way to mature
heterosexual relationships. At best, intense friendships are something
we're expected to grow out of.
As for the moral content of classical friendship, its commitment to
virtue and mutual improvement, that, too, has been lost. We have ceased
to believe that a friend's highest purpose is to summon us to the good by
offering moral advice and correction. We practice, instead, the nonjudgmental friendship of unconditional acceptance and support-"therapeutic" friendship, in Robert N. Bellah's scornful term. We seem to be terribly
fragile now. A friend fulfills her duty, we suppose, by taking our side-validating our feelings, supporting our decisions, helping us to feel good
about ourselves. We tell white lies, make excuses when a friend does
something wrong, do what we can to keep the boat steady. We're busy
people; we want our friendships fun and friction-free.
Yet even as friendship became universal and the classical ideal
lost its force, a new kind of idealism arose, a new repository for some
of friendship's deepest needs: the group friendship or friendship circle.
Companies of superior spirits go back at least as far as Pythagoras and Plato
and achieved new importance in the salons and coffeehouses of the 17th
and 18th centuries, but the Romantic age gave them a fresh impetus and
emphasis. The idea of friendship became central to their self-conception,
whether in Wordsworth's circle or the "small band of true friends" who
witness Emma's marriage in Austen. And the notion of superiority
acquired a utopian cast, so that the circle was seen-not least because
474
DERESIEWICZ
I FAUX FRIENDSHIP
forever
speaking
of its very emphasis on friendship-as
Best friends
the harbinger of a more advanced age.
may not be on
The same was true, a century later, of
the Bloomsbury Group, two of whose
terms by this time
members, Woolf and Forster, produced
month.
novel upon novel about friendship. It was
the latter who famously enunciated the group's political creed. "If I had to
choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend," he wrote,
"I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." Modernism was the
great age of the coterie, and like the legendary friendships of antiquity,
modernist friendship circles-bohemian, artistic, transgressive- set
their face against existing structures and norms. Friendship becomes, on
this account, a kind of alternative society, a refuge from the values of the
larger, fallen world.
The belief that the most significant part of an individual's emotional
life properly takes place not within the family but within a group of
friends began to expand beyond the artistic coterie and become general
during the last half of the 20th century. The Romantic-Bloomsburyan
prophecy of society as a set of friendship circles was, to a great extent,
realized. Mary McCarthy offered an early and tart view of the desirability
of such a situation in The Group; Barry Levinson, a later, kinder one in Diner.
Both works remind us that the ubiquity of group friendship owes a great
deal to the rise of youth culture. Indeed, modernity associates friendship itself with youth, a time of life it likewise regards as standing apart
from false adult values. "The dear peculiar bond of youth," Byron called
friendship, inverting the classical belief that its true practice demands
maturity and wisdom. With modernity's elevation of youth to supreme
status as the most vital and authentic period of life, friendship became
the object of intense emotion in two contradictory but often simultaneous directions. We have sought to prolong youth indefinitely by holding
fast to our youthful friendships, and we have mourned the loss of youth
through an unremitting nostalgia for those friendships. One of the most
striking things about the way the 20th century understood friendship
was the tendency to view it through the filter of memory, as if it could be
recognized only after its loss, and as if that loss were inevitable.
The culture of group friendship reached its apogee in the 1960s. Thro
of the counterculture's most salient and ideologically charged social
forms were the commune-a community of friends in self-imagined
retreat from a heartlessly corporatized society-and the rock'n'roll
"band" (not "group" or "combo"), its name evoking Shakespeare's "band
of brothers" and Robin Hood's band of Merry Men, its great exemplar the
Beatles. Communes, bands, and other 60s friendship groups (including
Woodstock, the apotheosis of both the commune and the rock concert)
were celebrated as joyous, creative places of eternal youth-havens
next
475
6 I HOW WE CHANGE
from the adult world. To go through life within one was the era's utopian
dream; it is no wonder the Beatles' break-up was received as a generational tragedy. It is also no wonder that 60s group friendship began to
generate its own nostalgia as the baby boom began to hit its 30s. The Big
Chill, in 1983, depicted boomers attempting to recapture the magic of a
late-60s friendship circle. ("In a cold world," the movie's tagline reads,
"you need your friends to keep you warm.") Thirtysomething, taking a step
further, certified group friendship as the new adult norm. Most of the
characters in those productions, though, were married. It was only in
the 1990s that a new generation, remaining single well past 30, found its
own images of group friendship in Seinfeld, Sex and the City, and, of course,
Friends. By that point, however, the notion of friendship as a redoubt of
moral resistance, a shelter from normative pressures and incubator of
social ideals, had disappeared. Your friends didn't shield you from the
mainstream, they were the mainstream.
And so we return to Facebook. With the social-networking sites of the
new century-Friendster and MySpace were launched in 2003, Facebook
in 2004-the friendship circle has expanded to engulf the whole of the
social world, and in so doing, destroyed both its own nature and that of the
individual friendship itself. Facebook's very premise-and promise-is
that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they are, my friends,
all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not in the same place, or,
rath~r, they're not my friends. They're simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set
of baseball cards is the New York Mets.
I remember realizing a few years ago that most of the members of
what I thought of as my "circle" didn't actually know one another. One
I'd met in graduate school, another at a job, one in Boston, another in
Brooklyn, one lived in Minneapolis now, another in Israel, so that I was
ultimately able to enumerate some 14 people, none of whom had ever
met any of the others. To imagine that they added up to a circle, an
embracing and encircling structure, was a belief, I realized, that violated
the laws of feeling as well as geometry. They were a set of points, and I
was wandering somewhere among them. Facebook seduces us, however,
into exactly that illusion, inviting us to believe that by assembling a list,
we have conjured a group. Visual juxtaposition creates the mirage of
emotional proximity. "It's like they're all having a conversation," a woman
I know once said about her Facebook page, full of posts and comments
from friends and friends of friends. "Except they're not."
Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a
feeling-from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging
the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls. The same
476
DERESIEWICZ
I FAUX FRIENDSHIP
path was long ago trodden by community. As the traditional face-to-face
community disappeared, we held on to what we had lost-the closeness,
the rootedness-by clinging to the word, no matter how much we had to
water down its meaning. Now we speak of the Jewish "community" and
the medical "community" and the "community" of readers, even though
none of them actually is one. What we have, instead of community, is, if
we're lucky, a "sense" of community-the feeling without the structure;
a private emotion, not a collective experience. And now friendship, which
arose-to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going
the same way. We have "friends," just as we belong to "communities."
Scanning my Facebook page gives me, precisely, a "sense" of connection.
Not an actual connection, just a sense.
What purpose do all those wall posts
Facebook
and status updates serve? On the first beautiful weekend of spring this year, a friend
US · • ·
posted this update from Central Park: "[Soand-so) is in the Park with the rest of the
have
City." The first question that comes to mind
is, if you're enjoying a beautiful day in the
a group.
park, why don't you give your iPhone a
,
rest? But the more important one is, why did you need to tell us that?
We have always shared our little private observations and moments of
feeling-it's part of what friendship's about, part of the way we remain
present in one another's lives-but things are different now. Until a few
years ago, you could share your thoughts with only one friend at a time
(on the phone, say), or maybe with a small group, later, in person. And
when you did, you were talking to specific people, and you tailored what
you said, and how you said it, to who they were-their interests, their
personalities, most of all, your degree of mutual intimacy. "Reach out
and touch someone" meant someone in particular, someone you were
actually thinking about. It meant having a conversation. Now we're just
broadcasting our stream of consciousness, live from Central Park, to all
500 of our friends at once, hoping that someone, anyone, will confirm
our existence by answering back. We haven't just stopped talking to our
friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of
them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass,
a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle,
but to a cloud.
,
It's amazing how fast things have changed. Not only don't we Mave
Wordsworth and Coleridge anymore, we don't even have Jerry and Ge,brge.
Today, Ross and Chandler would be writing on each other's walls. Carrie
and the girls would be posting status updates, and if they did manage to
find the time for lunch, they'd be too busy checking their BlackBerrys to
have a real conversation. Sex and Friends went off the air just five years
seduces
to believe that
by assembling a Jist,
We
COnjured
477
6 I HOW WE CHANGE
ago, and already we live in a different world. Friendship (like activism)
has been smoothly integrated into our new electronic lifestyles. We're too
busy to spare our friends more time than it takes to send a text. We're
too busy, sending texts. And what happens when we do find the time to
get together? I asked a woman I know whether her teenage daughters
and their friends still have the kind of intense friendships that kids once
did. Yes, she said, but they go about them differently. They still stay up
talking in their rooms, but they're also online with three other friends,
and texting with another three. Video chatting is more intimate, in theory,
than speaking on the phone, but not if you're doing it with four people
at once. And teenagers are just an early version of the rest of us. A study
found that one American in four reported having no close confidants, up
from one in 10 in 1985. The figures date from 2004, and there's little doubt
that Facebook and texting and all the rest of it have already exacerbated
the situation. The more people we know, the lonelier we get.
The new group friendship, already vitiated itself, is cannibalizing our
individual friendships as the boundaries between the two blur. The most
disturbing thing about Facebook is the extent to which people are willingare eager-to conduct their private lives in public. "hola cutie-pie! i'm in
town on wednesday. lunch?" "Julie, I'm so glad we're back in touch. xoxox."
"Sorry for not calling, am going through a tough time right now." Have these
people forgotten how to use e-mail, or do they actually prefer to stage the
emotional equivalent of a public grope? I can understand "[So-and-so] is
in the Park with the rest of the City," but I am incapable of comprehending this kind of exhibitionism. Perhaps I need to surrender the idea that
the value of friendship lies precisely in the space of privacy it creates: not
the secrets that two people exchange so much as the unique and inviolate
world they build up between them, the spider web of shared discovery they
spin out, slowly and carefully, together. There's something faintly obscene
about performing that intimacy in front of everyone you know, as if its real
purpose were to show what a deep person you are. Are we really so hungry
for validation? So desperate to prove we have friends?
But surely Facebook has its benefits. Long-lost friends can reconnect, far-flung ones can stay in touch. I wonder, though. Having recently
moved across the country, I thought that Facebook would help me feel
connected to the friends I'd left behind. But now I find the opposite is
true. Reading about the mundane details of their lives, a steady stream
of trivia and ephemera, leaves me feeling both empty and unpleasantly
full, as if I had just hinged on junk food, and precisely because it reminds
me of the real sustenance, the real knowledge, we exchange by e-mail or
phone or face-to-face. And the whole theatrical quality of the business,
the sense that my friends are doing their best to impersonate themselves, only makes it worse. The person I read about, I cannot help feeling, is not quite the person I know.
478
\
DERESIEWICZ I
FAUX FRIENDSHIP
As for getting back in touch with old friends-yes, when they're
people you really love, it's a miracle. But most of the time, they're not.
They're someone you knew for a summer in camp, or a midlevel friend
from high school. They don't matter to you as individuals anymore, certainly not the individuals they are now, they matter because they made
up the texture of your experience at a certain moment in your life, in
conjunction with all the other people you knew. Tear them out of that
texture-read about their brats, look at pictures of their vacation-and
they m~an nothing. Tear out enough of them and you ruin the texture
itself, replace a matrix of feeling and memory, the deep subsoil of experience, with a spurious sense of familiarity. Your 18-year-old self knows
them. Your 40-year-old self should not know them.
Facebook holds out a utopian possibility: What once was lost will
now be found. But the heaven of the past is a promised land destroyed
in the reaching. Facebook, here, becomes the anti-madeleine, an eraser of
memory. Carlton Fisk has remarked that he's watched the videotape of his
famous World Series home run only a few times, lest it overwrite his own
recollection of the event. Proust knew that memory is a skittish creature
that peeks from its hole only when it isn't being sought. Mementos, snapshots, reunions, and now this- all of them modes of amnesia, foes of true
remembering. The past should stay in the heart, where it belongs:
Finally, the new social-networking
The most disturbing
Web sites have falsified our understanding of intimacy itself, and with
thing about Facebook
it, our understanding of ourselves.
is the extent to which
The absurd idea, bruited about in
people
willing ...
the media, that a MySpace profile or
"25 Random Things About Me" can tell
to conduct their private
us more about someone than even a
lives in public.
good friend might be aware of is based
on desiccated notions about what knowing another person means: First,
that intimacy is confessional-an idea both peculiarly American and
peculiarly young, perhaps because both types of people tend to travel
among strangers, and so believe in the instant disgorging of the self as
the quickest route to familiarity. Second, that identity is reducible to
information: the name of your cat, your favorite Beatie, the stupid thing
you did in seventh grade. Third, that it is reducible, in particular, to the
kind of information that social-networking Web sites are most interested in eliciting, consumer preferences. Forget that we're all conducting
market research on ourselves. Far worse is that Facebook amplifies our
longstanding tendency to see ourselves (''I'm a Skin Bracer man!") in
just those terms. We wear T-shirts that proclaim our brand loyalty, pique
ourselves on owning a Mac, and now put up lists of our favorite songs.
"15 movies in 15 minutes. Rule: Don't take too long to think about it."
are
479
6 I HOW WE CHANGE
So information replaces experience, as it has throughout our culture.
But when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and
why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to mind,
or their fear of spiders. It is their qualities of character. This one's emotional generosity, that one's moral seriousness, the dark humor of a third.
Yet even those are just descriptions, and no more specify the individuals
uniquely than to say that one has red hair, another is tall. To understand
what they really look like, you would have to see a picture. And to understand who they really are, you would have to hear about the things they've
done. Character, revealed through action: the two eternal elements of narrative. In order to know people, you have to listen to their stories.
But that is precisely what the Facebook page does not leave room
for, or 500 friends, time for. Literally does not leave room for. E-mail, with
its rapid-fire etiquette and scrolling format, already trimmed the letter
down to a certain acceptable maximum, perhaps a thousand words.
Now, with Facebook, the box is shrinking even more, leaving perhaps a
third of that length as the conventional limit for a message, far less for
a comment. (And we all know the deal on Twitter.) The 10-page missive
has gone the way of the buggy whip, soon to be followed, it seems, by
the three-hour conversation. Each evolved as a space for telling stories,
an act that cannot usefully be accomplished in much less. Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition. Exchanging
stories is like making love: probing, questing, questioning, caressing. It
is mutual. It is intimate. It takes patience, devotion, sensitivity, subtlety,
skill-and it teaches them all, too.
They call them social-networking sites for a reason. Networking
once meant something specific: climbing the jungle gym of professional
contacts in order to advance your career. The truth is that Hume and
Smith were not completely right. Commercial society did not eliminate
the self-interested aspects of making friends and influencing people, it
just changed the way we went about it. Now, in the age of the entrepreneurial self, even our closest relationships are being pressed onto this
template. A recent book on the sociology of modern science describes a
networking event at a West Coast university: "There do not seem to be
any singletons-disconsolately lurking at the margins-nor de dyads
appear, except fleetingly." No solitude, no friendship, no space for refusalthe exact contemporary paradigm. At the same time, the author assures
us, "face time" is valued in this "community" as a "high-bandwidth interaction," offering "unusual capacity for interruption, repair, feedback and
learning." Actual human contact, rendered "unusual" and weighed by the
values of a systems engineer. We have given our hearts to machines, and
now we are turning into machines. The face of friendship in the new
century.
480